Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A documentary on a former Miss Wyoming who is charged with abducting and imprisoning a young Mormon Missionary.
Errol Morris's Tabloid is a wonderfully strange documentary about Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen whose obsessive pursuit of a Mormon missionary led to one of Britain's most lurid tabloid scandals. The story itself is stranger than fiction, full of wild contradictions and unreliable narrators, giving it a high novelty score — only Morris could turn this material into something so darkly comic and philosophically layered. Acting is not applicable in a traditional sense but the talking-head subjects are compelling if uneven. Cinematography is functional documentary work, elevated slightly by Morris's signature Interrotron technique but not visually inventive overall. The ending, which spirals into cloning dogs in Korea, is appropriately surreal and satisfying as a coda to an already bizarre tale.